Video games sometimes feature a user-created avatar as a user-controlled character. Typically, a user may customize the avatar in a variety of ways dealing with appearance, such as facial features and clothing. This allows the user a more personalized and involved video gaming experience. For instance, the NINTENDO CORPORATION® has a user-created avatar, the MII®, which a user may then use as his or her user-controlled character in video games that support this feature, such as WII SPORTS®.
While avatars may be created on the system, or in a particular game, it is often desirable for a user's created avatar to be available for use by various video game applications. For instance, players may desire that an avatar associated with the player be available for incorporation into new video game applications without having to recreate the avatar. Furthermore, it may be advantageous for the video game application to use the video game system's rendering functions and incorporate the rendered avatar into the game output rather than providing its own avatar rendering functions. In either situation, it would be advantageous for video game applications to be able to access application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the applications to access avatar information into their own rendering functions, or to incorporate system rendered avatars into the application's outputs.